Interconnect Cables- Eating my Words

Beg to differ. Not everyone can change their room easily, walls, windows, aren't easily shifted. You have to work within the physical shape of your room. Sure you can stick up a bass trap or three, but not everyone wants to do that (me included) and good sound can be had without too much difficulty.

Position your speakers, move them six inches, note the difference. Then try some speakers by a different manufacturer. Exactly.

 

Just because you don't want to does not obviate the laws of physics.

The frequency response of the average room +/- 10 or 15db is dramatically greater a deficit than the average frequency response of even pretty crummy speakers.

 

It's most likely a synergy thing instead of price. $5 interconnects might be just what that $100K system is looking for and that $500 system might just love those $5K interconnects.

 

I'm not arguing with the laws of physics, I am positing that most people won't get round to either i) adding bass traps, or similar or ii) knocking walls down to make a change to the sound of their stereo. And if they want to make a change, then they'll need to change something else. Or move house. So the room might have an impact (acknowledged) but you're stuck with it.

And I doubt the law of physics would argue with that.

 

Great gear in a bad room sounds better then bad gear in a great room.

 

Personally, I find this hard to believe.

 

Hyperbole (/haɪˈpɜrbəliː/hy-pur-bə-lee;[1]Greek: ὑπερβολή, hyperbolē, lit. "exaggeration") is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. In rhetoric, it is also sometimes known as auxesis (lit. "growth"). In poetry and oratory, it emphasizes, evokes strong feelings, and creates strong impressions. As a figure of speech, it is usually not meant to be taken literally. --- Thanks Wikipedia!

 

Actually I'm not sure that's entirely true. Depends on how bad the room or the gear is, is and how bad the set up is. I've heard plenty of great gear sound lousy in bad rooms with really poor set ups -- you know, speakers half behind couches, big echoing rooms, etc.

 

I'm definitely not discounting the importance of rooms/acoustics/etc. But what would you rather listen to - a boom box in an acoustically perfect setting or a reference system in somebody's spare bedroom? I guess to me, it comes down to the fact you can make a bad room better but you can't make bad gear better. I used to think my room was a lost cause, now I'm pretty content with it.

 

Not always. Put the best gear in the world in a perfectly cubed, concrete room and let me know how great it sounds...

 

Listening... instead. Ha, ha, ha

 

Okay. And the inverse is preferable?

 

I'm sure you meant well, but insulting your intended audience is not the way to get your message across.

 

The truth is the room really defines the sound and differences of setup and room treatment (and general room size, shape, materials and furnishings), are multiple orders of magnitude greater than, say, the differences between interconnects, and even here, in a forum nominally devoted to audiophilia, you often see posters displaying systems with speakers backed into corners, listening positions back up to untreated reflective walls, wildly asymmetrical setups (and not as a solution to dealing with problematic room modes), all kinds of reflective stuff and furnishings between the speakers and the listening position, etc -- system setups that inherently are going to suffer from frequency peaks and nulls, time smearing, boomy overhang, flutter echo and other problems way more substantial than anything that's going to result from changing a line-level interconnect or speaker cable, and maybe even bigger than, say, changing from on solid state amp of the same power, current and input impedance to another. I think better results probably could be had -- it you care about imaging, flat frequency response -- with, say, decent gear in a good room with a great set up than with state of the art gear in a lousy room with improper set up.

I think the biggest barrier to entry for newcomers with an interest in audio is the discovery that they're probably going to have to devote a room in their homes to their audio systems, or at least make audio setup the primary driver of the furnishing of the room in which their systems are located. And too often, instead of just sucking it up and dealing with that, we see audiophiles chasing more and more expensive gear, or audio bling -- which sometimes is what I think expensive audio interconnects are, they're like expensive mechanical-movement, jewelry-case watches, a bit of luxury everyone can afford but not better time-tellers than cheap, quartz-movement watches -- in hopes of achieving marginal improvements while ignoring gross improvements that need to be made (and in some cases involve little expense but a big lifestyle commitment).

But I think we're kinda way off topic now.

 

Absolutely. I'd rather listen to a 1980s boombox or $10 computer speakers in even an average-sounding room (i.e. typical bedroom with no treatments whatsoever) much less a really great room, than anything in the echo-y, reflective, boomy, brittle extreme example I described. Wouldn't you?

The point is, there are no absolutes in any of this. Saying the gear is always more important than the room, or the room is always more important than the gear, or the source is always more important than the speakers, or the speakers are always more important than the source... it's all pedantic nonsense. None of those are always true; all of them are important and which one(s) take precedence is a personal matter that only means anything in your specific situation. In an ideal world you'd have it all, but in the real world few of us do... most of us make compromises somewhere.

(I know I do -- my listening room is my living room, and despite not having done anything specific in terms of treatment it sounds wonderful. Makes me ponder just how much better it could sound if I did do something... or was able to enlarge the room...)

 

Prioritizing and weighing the elements involved seems to be very elusive, not just in audio, but life in general. I think it is that the whole system is overwhelming, so a small part is isolated, and that is where the effort is focused. This narrowing of our vision makes the whole seem more controllable, and it also becomes much less demanding on us.

 

I get it, there's definitely a general tendency that we all fall into sometimes I think that's pretty reductive. I also think a product-based "solution" is just easier for a lot of people than a process-based one. So, putting aside products like room treatments, the processs of playing test tones, measuring frequency response, calculating room nodes, repositioning speakers and seating, etc. seems like a much more daunting step than buying an interconnect. And also I do think the lifestyle demands the hobby makes on us is not for everyone -- some people are never going to devote a room to audio, or take the best audio rooms in their homes and use it for audio instead of, say, a family entertaining space. I pass no judgement on that. We all make decisions, have priorities, make compromises to live the live we prefer within our means and abilities. But, when it comes to this question of which sounds better -- better gear in a worse room or worse gear in a better room, I don't think the answer clearly favors better gear. Like I said originally, depends how much better the better gear is and how much worse the worse room is.

 

I don't think it has to be either or. Any room can be improved acoustically with proper treatment and not for not much money if you go with the DIY method.
My room isnt' perfect but it is all I can afford. My room did measure well except at 38z which I addressed with some DIY corner bass traps.
The one aspect of room treatment I often see neglected is defraction.

 

Right, that's why the hypothetical -- would you rather hear the best gear in a lousy room vs. lesser gear in a great room -- doesn't really hold up. You gotta have the right gear for the room. I mean, you put a pair of giant dipole Acoustats in a small spare bedroom it may very well sound worse than small, lesser dynamic mini monitors in the same room set up for nearfield listening. But if you take a little care to get the right setup for the room and treat where necessarily you can wind up with a lot better results than just buying the "best" gear you can afford and plopping it down around the furniture. Diffusion is tricky is a relatively small space.

 

I just switched from Monoprice interconnects to JL Audio XB-BLUAIC2-25 2-Channel Twisted-Pair Audio Interconnect Cable to connect my DAC from my PC to my receiver. I bought these with a fair amount of skepticism. I'm listening right now to the 1994 Virgin Sticky Fingers CD uploaded to JRiver.

I have to say I'm impressed. This was always a good sounding recording, but I am hearing more clarity. This is enough of an improvement to justify the price and JLs aren't even close to the most expensive cables on the market.

 

Everyone comes around once they start using there ears instead of preconceived ideas.

 

I think different memory processes are at work. I often struggle to recall the name of someone I haven't heard from in a while, say from a work environment, if the ring up fit insurance. I recognise the voice but without the visual cue, don't know who it is.

 

I'll play the devil's advocate. Recalling a name is different from recognizing a voice.

 

My point was is more a case if "I think I know this person" but can't be sure. If it's someone I've known for years, speak to often that's different. In my work I meet loads of people and I can't rely on what I think I know.

 

Spot on, mate!

Human brain has been trained and pre-programmed during thousand years of the surviving of the fittest war in order to distinguish in the dark the whisper of your friend from any other voice. This has nothing to do with cables in a stereo system. Survival is a very specialised art, and doesn't care about romantic midrange, bass control or realistic hi-hat. Different hearing experiences involve very different circuits in the hearing system, which is much more evolved than a flat microphone connected to an objective brain, as many think it is.